After a two year hiatus, I’ve started bench pressing again.

Really, I have no business benching. My shoulders are shot and I’ve always had a love hate relationship with this particular exercise.

I’ve always had a really good bench for my size (Love), and the bench has punished me for this on numerous occasions (Hate…really, really strong hate).

Despite these facts, about a month ago I bought Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 e-book and was inspired to maybe give the bench press one more chance.

In order to do my absolute best to keep myself functioning during this little fling, I have committed to see my Osteopath when ever I have any shoulder/neck issues.

Why an Osteo? Well she’s a message therapist/Osteo and I’ve had good luck with her in the past.

Now this post has nothing to do with the bench press or osteopathy…but it was a good lead into my story.

This morning I was at my Osteo’s office. She happens to share an office with a Naturopath (stop me if you’ve heard this one before).

As I was paying my bill the Naturopath came out of her office with her patient. As the patient was checking out the Naturopath instructed her to hold her arm straight out in front of her.

The Naturopath then held various bottles to the woman’s chest while simultaneously pushing down on her outstretched arm.

Apparently this is called ‘muscle testing’. The theory is that this one simple diagnostic can tell you how your body reacts to different things.

‘bad’ things will make you noticeably and instantly weaker, while ‘good’ things will make you instantly stronger (In this case something called ‘arnica’ made her stronger, while her cell-phone made her ‘off the charts’ weaker).

This is the description I found at goodhealthinfo.net:

fundamental to traditional Chinese medicine, muscle testing is a noninvasive way of evaluating the body’s imbalances and assessing its needs. It involves testing the body’s responses when applying slight pressure to a large muscle, to provide information on energy blockages, the functioning of the organs, nutritional deficiencies, and food sensitivities, among other things. It can also be used to test the body’s responses to herbs and other remedies.

Now, I have no problems with ‘fringe’ ideas. Admittedly I’m a skeptic at heart, but I consider myself a rare form of skeptic – I’m an optimistic skeptic – I REALLY would love for these things to work, but I beleive they need to be properly tested (and the skeptic in me doubts many things are able to pass proper testing).

With muscle testing, I want to see evidence of repetition and reproducibility. Meaning it should be tested multiple times and have similar measurable results each time.

So here is a quick study that any masters student could/can do.

1. Set up a force transducer (a device that measures force) along a length of chain.

2. Have your subjects stretch their arm in front of them while holding the length of chain.

3. Take a baseline measurement of how much force it takes to lower your subjects arm while they are resisting. (they’re trying to keep their arm parallel to the ground, you are pulling their arm down while measuring the amount of force you are using)

4. (only for science geeks ==> use this number to set your acceptable range then conduct your power analysis to figure out how many subjects/measurements you will need)

5. Place random objects in individual black bags (Arnica Montana, Aspartame, Echinacea, ginseng, creatine, a cell-phone, some Lego blocks and rat poison)

6. While both the investigator and subject are blinded to what is in the bag, place the bag against the subjects chest as you ask them to resist as you pull their arm down.

7. Measure the force recorded by the force transducer.

8. Repeat this with the same subject on different days while giving the items in a different random order each time. Allow for a seven day period in between tests.

If the ‘bad’ things consistently and repeatedly cause a decrease in the force that the subjects can generate, while the ‘good’ things cause either an increase or no change in force, then I am all for muscle testing. And, I am completely open to the idea of using this as a diagnostic test.

However, until these tests are conducted, analyzed, peer reviewed and published, I think it can be potentially dangerous and misleading to use easily testable diagnositcs in medicine before they have been proven valid (and ESPECIALLY after they have been proven invalid on multiple occasions).

Proper measurement is a founding principle of science, when professionals are giving advice it is important that they ignore what they ‘want to work’ (the optimist in them) and concentrate on what has been proven to work (satisfying their inner skeptic)

BP

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Protein Breakdown!

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Scary words right? The word ‘breakdown’ seems to imply something bad.

So obviously anything that “Prevents Protein Breakdown!” must be good for us.

In fact, if something “Prevents Protein Breakdown!” it’s probably worth at LEAST $49.99 and is the KEY to building rock-hard-super-dense-shredded-muscle! (or at least so says the economy and logic at your local supplement shop)

But, what do we really know about protein breakdown?

Well for starters it is an extremely effective way to maintain functional, non-damaged proteins in your body.

Yep, protein catabolism plays a HUGE role in keeping your body healthy.

Also, it plays a big role in BUILDING your muscles and making you stronger.

Damaged or non-functional proteins in your muscles are identified and ‘tagged’ by your body to be broken down for recycling purposes. This process removes damaged proteins from your muscles and provides valuable amino-acids for anabolic or rebuilding purposes.

In fact, you could speculate that this is an essential first step in the muscle building process.

Protein breakdown also provides many of the amino acids used to build new proteins in other parts of your body. Important things like internal organs and the like.  It has been suggested that as much as 80% of the amino acids that come from protein breakdown in your body are re-utilized in protein building metabolism.

Lastly, but maybe most importantly protein breakdown (or more specifically protein turnover) accounts for up to 70% of your resting metabolic rate.

It is a normal, ongoing process of recycling and reusing the amino acids in your body, that contributes to keeping you healthy, functional and that burns a significant amount of your daily calories.

Not nearly as scary as some people would lead you to believe.

Some of the tissues in your body breakdown and turnover faster than others…so not all protein breakdown comes from your muscles. In fact…relative to the rest of your body very little protein breakdown actually occurs in your muscles.

During a 7 day fast, your liver will lose 40% of its nitrogen (a marker of protein breakdown) and your visceral organs (your G.I. system) loses anywhere from 20-28%. Your muscle, skin and skeleton only lose around 8%.

The bottom line is that protein breakdown is an essential part of your metabolism, it allows for repairing tissues and provides amino acids for building new healthy proteins. It powers your daily calorie expenditure and simply does not occur at an accelerated rate in your muscles (but it does play an important role in your ability to build muscle).

BP

www.EatStopEat.com

PS- Kinda makes you wonder about the education of the people who tell you fasting decreases your metabolic rate AND increases your protein breakdown!

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If we want to improve the quality of nutrition information on the net then we need to stop blaming ‘certified nutritionists’ for all of the crap information that is available on-line.

I mean it.

You can’t really blame the ‘certified nutritionists’. They probably paid good money for their certification and thus they probably beleive what they have been taught is true.

Most of them do not have advanced degrees in nutrition, and the vast majority of them are truly trying to help you lose weight and eat better.

So they are not the ones we should be blaming when they promote ridiculous nutrition myths – it’s the people who gave them the horrible education that we need to blame.

In case you didn’t know – No one certifies the certifiers. There is no governing body of nutrition that oversees the content of these courses.

Many of these course are multiple-choice mail-in style tests.

(Even the prestigious CSCS examination is a simple multiple choice test – When I wrote it in 2003 there was no practical or hands on component)

So it’s not the certified nutritionists you should be mad at, it’s the people who are misleading THEM that deserve our wrath.

These people are singled out at taken advantage of. They fall for clever marketing that prays on the fact that they really, truly want to help people eat better and lose weight!

If you get bad pseudo-science style advice – look at the true source – they are the people who need to be reprimanded.

BP

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I’m right in the middle of a series of home renovations. There is dry wall dust everywhere, but it is finally coming together starting to really take shape.

Since we are finishing our basement, one of the things I had to do was to move all of my files from the basement into their TEMPORARY home in my office (Temporary – because they’re going back into the basement as soon as possible!)

In amongst all of the papers, I found a series of notes from my first year nutrition classes.

Curious, I started reading through the notes. Guess what I found?

WAY too many scientific papers. WAY too much minutia. WAY too much ’small picture’ type stuff AND a whole bunch of OCE thinking.

Really, my first year notes were full of enzyme pathways, redox reactions and some hard core biochemistry.

This was FIRST YEAR UNIVERSITY!

Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

If I could design a nutrition course…I’d start basic, really basic.

We would study super basic concepts, and build a strong foundation.

Then we would study the application of statistical analysis.

Then we would study scientific methodology and how to design a study.

Then (and only then) we would finally investigate the origins of our current nutritional beleifs, studying research from as far back as the 1890’s.

Finally (maybe after 2 or 3 years) we would start reviewing more current studies, when we finally have enough statistical, historical and methodological background to actually UNDERSTAND how these studies fit into the TOTAL BODY OF NUTRITIONAL SCIENCE.

Nutrition (like any science) is like a pyramid – you need a STRONG foundation to build upon. If you only ever investigate what’s on top you never get the big picture.

And if you don’t know the foundation, and only ever write about the small little top portion – well that’s how we get pseudoscience nonsense.

In fact, if I had my way, this would be the very first test you would get in first year Nutrition 101.

(CLICK ME)

Simple and easy, and starts with a basic philosophy to build upon. It includes basic science, an understanding of the psychology behind eating and it meets the need for practicality in our nutrition and diet recomendations.

With out a proper foundation we get scientific illeteracy in the people promoting health.

Very scary.

If you are studying nutrition, or reading diet books always try to determine whether or not the author understands the basic fundamentals, or if they are just blinding you with scientific nonsense.

BP

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